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Regardless, wouldn't they also be required to pay Qualcomm to be able to access the US frequencies, even not using their chips? If Apple has to pay higher royalties when it doesn't use Qualcomm chips than when it does, to access those frequencies, I don't know why it would be different here.

All I'm saying is, don't expect this to run on 4G/LTE in north america. Cause they never do.

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Interesting to see how many will actually be taking the risk with this.
Back when I acquired the Jolla phone, I did it regardless it being more likely to fail than succeed, because the project looked interesting and in $300 range the price wasn't totally unbearable. But with double the price? No way.

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Jolla did the same and they successed they live. And look as example to the garbage fair phone 1, they have extremly small profit rate per mobile. They sold 100.000 that seems to be enough to keep them in business.

2% Linux users worldwide by 1.5 billion smartphones sold each year would be 300mio users. Even if only 1% of the linux users buy that phone its 3mio devices. Heck even if onely 0.1% linux users buy that device its 300.000 Devices.

If they make 100 dollar with each device before you calculate coding in they have a budget of 30mio for coding.

Jolla built on top of Meego. Admittedly that is an option I hadn't considered. On the other hand, I think your math is wrong. 1.5 billion smartphones might be sold per year, but 2% of 1.5 billion is 30 million, not 300 million. So your 1% of Linux users would be 300,000 and your 0.1% would be 30,000.

And half of the work the community will do them for free cause many of the features are needed in that upstream projects eventualy, like good touch support etc in gnome. Also most features a phone can do gnome/gkt apps can do already, you just need different guis thats all.

There is nothing stopping the free work now. The free software community could have forked Meego, or Ubuntu Touch, or Firefox OS and made something. It didn't happen. Why would Purism be different?

Also the argument mozilla or ubuntu, is a bad argument that are more or less big coorporations. They need a big scale to do stuff. if they dont earn 100 trilion of a business they concentrate on others. Its not always enough to make profit with something, if you can make MORE profit with something else companies kill projects.

Also in big companies development is more expensive, they pay developer higher vages and processes are slower and therefor more expensive. If Jolla with a propriatary fake GNU/Linux can survive and fairphone with a hard locked android 4.3 scam phone. Why should librem not be able to do it?

Fair points. (Technically Mozilla is a not-for-profit foundation and not a corporation, but your points still stand.) But I don't think Mozilla and Canonical stopped because the projects were not profitable enough. They stopped because the projects were dead, period. They couldn't get enough customer interest for it to matter.

And for a large development team, a lot of slowness is essential because you need a ton of investment in quality and automated testing.

On top of that Canonical startet a war against the linux community, so people boycotted or fought them on patches upstream etc.

Canonical had tons of enemies in the Linux community, but they also had tons of supporters. So even if 70% (I'm making that number up, it's besides the point) of the Linux community wasn't interested in Ubuntu Touch, they still had enough interest that the project could have succeeded. It still failed.

Also they proofed already that they can deliver, it went not perfekt but they even delivered on a coreboot without antifeatures, which I would not thought it would be doable, they did it. With extreme messures but thats a good thing they are serious about it. They are not the usual marketing scam, "eventualy we will opensource it" (...in 10000 years maybe)

So when they successed once (not all customers were happy but many were), I will not doubt that they do it again. And if its ruff so be it there are hundret tousends of developers heck millions out there, that will prioratise hackability / freedom higher than polish.

There aren't a million free software developers out there. If there were, this problem would have been solved long ago.

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It depends on what your standards are.
With Android, the fact is that you can never be sure since the drivers are closed source.
There is more closed source other than the drivers, but you can't get around the drivers. Easily, at least.

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Well privacy implies security. First of all we have that to that degree with jolla already doesn't we, and you can install sailfish-os on many modern smartphones. So you want that somebody installs sailfish for you?

The free driver matters, even for this horrible "convinience" people that don't care about freedom but only want some linux tools. you probably use also macosx cause you only want your cli commands then you are happy in a prison.

Well back to topic, without free drivers you have the situation like in android. Take the Fairphone 1 as extreme example... cause they dont have the source code to the driver even the fucking vendor can't release android > 4.x. on it.

You can't upgrade the kernel without the sources so this phones get old by design. And of course with that very old kernel if you dont backport 10mio bugfixes which they can't do you will have a very unsecure device.

No "privacy" without security is a pipe dream. Again buy a nexus 5 or something like that put on sailfishos and you are fine. If you don't want free drivers there are 10mio options. But with free drivers there is basicly 0 options. Well except 20 year old Replicant devices.

If i'm not mistaken, these guys will use open source drivers. They chose the hardware to be able to do it.
BUT, some of the firmware at least (modem, i think), will not be open source.
Therefore, yes, there won't be true, 100%, guarantee privacy / open source goodness.

I do think it's a huge step in the right direction though, and if people really support this project, it will send a big message.

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If i'm not mistaken, these guys will use open source drivers. They chose the hardware to be able to do it.
BUT, some of the firmware at least (modem, i think), will not be open source.
Therefore, yes, there won't be true, 100%, guarantee privacy / open source goodness.

I do think it's a huge step in the right direction though, and if people really support this project, it will send a big message.

Thats why I would been for no modem it just raises the price and many people dont need it cause wlan is everywhere.